Book recommendation. "I Didn't Do it For You" Michela Wrong

[alfredo]

This book is about Eritrea, a small African nation that has been used and abused by the colonial powers, including America.


She traces the British, Egyptian, Italian, Russian, and American powers used Eritrea for their own goals.

I lived there at Kagnew station and witnessed some of what she describes. She does a whole chapter on our behavior. I personally know the three spooks she interviewed. I was too much of a wuss to get involved in the ugly games our servicemen were playing.

Ms Wrong's writing style is much to my liking. Her writing flows like Arundhati Roy's work. It reads like good fiction, but it is fact.

Here is a review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/112271627360650.xml&coll=2

The battle-weary British Army captain barely looks at the old Eritrean woman standing on the dusty road. It is 1941, and she is thanking him for driving the Italian fascists from her country. "I didn't do it for you, ," he snaps. And crisply marches away.

In her striking and disturbing new book, "I Didn't Do It for You," journalist Michela Wrong tells us that this nasty encounter has become a popular story among Eritreans. Although it might not have actually happened, it has achieved the status of a parable -- a revealing story about how Eritreans perceive the outsiders who have used the country like a geopolitical Game Boy.